


Of Cold Coffee and Tattered Books

by Acai



Series: Empty Cities and Hopeless Searching [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, Drabble, Homestuck AU, Oneshot, dave likes books tho, kind of, part two of four, there is just dave, there is no relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 09:14:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4619853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>PART TWO OF THE LONELY CITIES AND HOPELESS SEARCHING SERIES<br/>Your name is Dave Strider and you know that everyone around you is lying. You knew better, you knew that it had to be real. You know that everyone in that game was real, and when John said "let's go home," this isn't what you meant. This isn't home. This is lonely, sad, and frankly a little scary. There's no one here that you know, there's no Pesterchum and therefore no way to even see if they're all really out there. Sburb never existed, and everyone says they were all just figments of your subconscious.</p><p>You won't listen.</p><p>You know better.</p><p>or</p><p>the AU where after Sburb ended and they all went home it wasn't really home, but a new reset Earth that the game created.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Cold Coffee and Tattered Books

**Author's Note:**

> Just an AU I wrote real fast. There's going to be a sequel up within two days, so stay tuned and subscribe!
> 
> >>>>EDIT: *sigh* while trying to fix a glitch I accidently deleted this work. If you're just getting a notification for this a second time it's because I have just had to repost it, which also means that I lost all of your lovely comments! Arrg, I apologize.>FURTHER UPDATE, I managed to restore the comments ^.^

                Your name is Dave Strider and everyone around you is a liar. Even your bro, who never lied to you, was joining the bandwagon on this one.

                It was like when you’d gone up to the roof he’d called up everyone he knew and decided to play a sick prank on you. It was like he went to the furthest lengths to try and scare the shit out of you, and it was working. You were truly terrified at this point. Everything that happened never happened, every world that was up there in the sky never existed, everything you accomplished was nothing and every friend you lost, every ounce of stabbing grief and pain was a sick twist of your subconscious. It was the sickest prank bro ever played on you.

                The worst part was that you knew that it wasn’t a prank. Bro couldn’t do those things. He was pretty damn tricky, but he couldn’t tamper with Google.

                According to Google, there was no Sburb beta. There was no Pesterchum, either, and you found instead that your Pesterchum icon had been replaced with a white S in a blue cloud. Your username had been replaced with something shitty and your contacts were just a group of five or six kids that you’d never even heard of. You spent seven days desperately searching everything that you could for proof that it was all some gross prank, but the more you looked the more you found that it was, indeed, just a heart-wrenching reality full of people you don’t know and a brother who never found you on a horse in a crater. There wasn’t a single crater in this whole world, not from fiery meteors at least. Your thirteenth birthday didn’t result in a pair of shades, either. It had just meant a box from “Alex” who gave you a game. Not Sburb, just something by the people who made Halo. You never opened it apparently. It just sat on your dresser in its plastic wrapping. You don’t even touch it now, because you know that if you do put it in it’s not going to be anything but an animated guy running around on a screen.

It’s not going to be Sburb.

There’s not going to be Rose or John or Jade, there won’t be Karkat or the Mayor, there would never be any Skaia and no Derse to wake up on.

They always said that it was an eternal battle being fought between the light and dark forces, between Prospit and Derse, but it looked pretty ended now, to you at least.  

                In all honesty you would have been fine with not having the game. This world, you admitted, wasn’t too bad. You would have been fine with being the only one to remember the game, if only there were your friends to call you crazy for it when you tried to tell them about it.

It would have been better than shoving your hand into the slowly forming pile growing in the middle of all of you, it would have been better than hearing John’s cheerful, “Let’s go home!”, and letting yourself smile because it was finally over and you were all going home.

This wasn’t home though. You knew that from the moment that you felt yourself stir awake and you felt concrete below your back, digging into your skin. When you sat up and groaned because the setting sun was glaring right into your eyes you were on the roof of your apartment. It had been confusing, at first, being there alone. It had seemed off, too. But then you had just been glad to see the apartment there and intact and you so desperately hoped that Bro would be there.

And he was, he was at the desk on the computer and the TV was playing. You had pretty much flung yourself at him, ignoring his questions as to _why_ exactly you were hugging him. When he had finally pried you off you noticed three things.

He didn’t seem to have any recollection of being stabbed in the chest and dying. The calendar said a year that passed _years_ ago, and you kept it pretty up to date. And that you no longer were just as tall as your Bro, but several inches shorter. The television had the same date as the calendar scrawled across the bottom and you stared at it for what felt like forever.

“Bro,” you’d muttered. “Do you even know what Sburb is?” He’d shaken his head, looking completely confused and slightly worried about you as he said he needed to get back to work and had left you to run back to your room. It was no longer completely trashed from the game, the window wasn’t broken and the calendar read the same date as all the others. At this point you were completely lost, and growing nervous. You sat down at your computer, searching for the Pesterchum icon, just to find no such thing. It wasn’t in the app store, and when you opened Google and typed it in the search bar, you were given zero results. Where the app used to be was Skype. Googling Sburb got you just as many results.

So you opened Skype, and saw that you had some dumb username that you probably would have chosen when you were like, thirteen. In your contacts were several usernames that you’d never seen. A look at all of them verified that they were people that you hadn’t ever even heard of. Another check through Skype verified that there was no tentacleTherapist, there was no gardenGnostic, there was no ectoBiologist. There wasn’t a ghostyTrickster, there wasn’t any Rose Lalonde’s or anyone named anything even close to Jade Harley. Google searches on the names were just as helpful. You were left staring at a blank screen, feeling smaller and lonelier than you had even before you talked to any of them for the first time.

Nearly three months later you were staring at the same screen, not believing the people who told you none of it ever happened, never touching the video games on your shelf, never letting Bro drag you to school. You would have rather stayed in a twisted universe filled with death than this. This was even lonelier, because now you didn’t even have anyone to talk to. It was sad, it was dull, it was quiet and it was boring. You kept on the shades that you’d had your whole life, the ones that matched your Bro’s. You didn’t have a pair from your best friend to cherish because your best friend never even existed.

You wondered, some days, if you had completely lost it. If you had gone crazy after all of that. Crazy wasn’t something that you strived to be. Ironic? Hell yes. Cool? Even better. Crazy? No.

You didn’t feel very ironic or cool now, though. You weren’t either, not anymore. You were just some fourteen year old kid who lost it.

It was a pretty shitty thing to realize.

There was nothing bright or amazing about this world. In this world there was no way that above the clouds was a planet with troll kids on it, there was no way that there was a brilliant blue planet surrounded by the whitest clouds, there was no Prospit and Derse to wake up on in your dreams. There was just empty blackness to be filled with things that were just that.

Just dreams.

You didn’t give up, you tried but you couldn’t. You still stared hopelessly at the screen, logging into gmail to create another email that you used to make a new Skype account using your old username, the familiar turntechGodhead. You never got any messages on it, just the same old blank screen day after day.

That’s when you realized just _how_ pathetic you were being. So you shut off the computer and tried to do something with your life. You tried to forget about everything that happened in the game and you tried to bring back Dave Strider. You let the cool kid take over and talk for you, you let him do what he would have done if he hadn’t completely lost his mind.

It didn’t stop the piercing feeling when you would glance at the computer and not see anything flashing. It didn’t stop the disappointment of not dreaming, it didn’t stop the aching loneliness that invaded your mind. It didn’t stop everything from feeling like a lie.

You still tried to forget about it.

You went about the life that you lived before you knew what Sburb was, just living a duller, lonelier version of it. You forced yourself to get back into gaming, peeling off the plastic wrap of the game that  you got from your friend and sticking it in the console, mastering it in a matter of a few days. You took up reading the dumb books that Rose always tried to get you into, and you had to admit that they weren’t half bad.

Not that you would ever tell anyone that you read them.

When the last book in the series came out you stuck your phone in your pocket, leaving a note for your brother and walking to the mall to try and snag a copy. (Though if anyone asked you were just getting a new phone case because yours was shit.)

You cracked open the spine at the coffee shop across the street, for purposes of irony, settling into the book in an attempt to try and stop wondering if there was a Rose Lalonde doing the same someplace out there.

To try and stop wondering if anyone was out there.

To try and stop wondering if it was really just you, if you went mad.

To try and stop the aching feeling that you pretended wasn’t there.

To try and stop wondering if you were alone, if you were mad.

To try and stop thinking about a universe and a game and people that didn’t exist.

  
To try and stop telling yourself not to give up.

 

It was nearly one in the morning in the dimly lit coffee shop when you snapped the book shut and threw your cold drink away, finally leaving the quiet hum of the nearly empty coffee shop. It was pitch black and silent as you walked back, and considerably cold for Texas, even at night.

You didn’t notice that, though.

What you did notice was the lit up phone screen through your pocket.

 

>[1:12am]Skype Message from: carcinoGeneticist<

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me what you thought! Leave a comment and a kudos if you liked it, and if you found any errors please leave those in the comments as well for me to fix. Thanks for reading, and for the constant support! ^.^
> 
> REMEMBER TO SUBSCRIBE AND STAY TUNED FOR PART THREE


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